Trump would never

how to play the media had been honed through decades of courting and jousting that, even after a series of failures, had left him as an object of interest. That led to his public rebirth on The Apprentice and made him ready to rock and roll once social media blossomed.

Every social platform offered him the opportunity to run his own printing press and speak directly to fans and critics, but Twitter, a venue of choice for news junkies, always held a special allure. And Trump, who adores media attention while also being so singularly insecure that any form of criticism unspools him, has a love-hate relationship with Twitter.

So it came to pass that Twitter, which has long tolerated Trump’s retweeting of racists and anti-semites while painting his targets as everything from ‘‘skanks’’ to murderers, decided last week to slap fact-checking notices on a pair of bogus Trump tweets claiming that mail-in ballots lead to voting fraud.

Trump, who has the November election front of mind and is reeling from an onslaught of criticism for repeatedly bungling his response to Covid19, would have none of that. He claimed that revenge via a federal crackdown on Twitter and other social media companies was coming.

He has since signed an executive order that reportedly will strip Twitter and other social media platforms of liability protections they enjoy from lawsuits involving the content that users post on their sites – including false or defamatory content. In other